Samuel A. Alito, Jr.

Supreme Court of the United StatesConfirmedJanuary 31, 2006

Samuel Alito

On January 31, 2006, Judge Samuel A. Alito Jr. was confirmed by a 58-42 vote to serve a lifetime appointment on the United States Supreme Court. Link to testimony here. Click here to read Earthjustice's statement on Alito's confirmation.

On December 20, 2005, Earthjustice and four other national environmental groups announced formal opposition to the nomination of Judge Alito to the U.S. Supreme Court. This was the first time since the 1987 nomination of Robert Bork that Earthjustice -- or any national environmental group -- opposed a Supreme Court nominee.

Earthjustice did not make this decision lightly. Judge Alito has a 15-year record of judicial activism. His record suggests that he will spend the next several decades legislating from the bench, dismantling laws opposed by corporate special interests that protect the health and safety of families and communities.

Judge Alito joined in a 2-1 ruling that denied citizens' access to courts under the Clean Water Act, which authorizes "any citizen" to bring a civil enforcement action against alleged polluters. Judge Alito ruled that a citizen group did not have standing to sue because it had not demonstrated that serious harm to the environment had occurred, despite the fact that the trial court had imposed a rare $2.6 million fine for the company's violations of the Act. The Supreme Court has since rejected Alito's analysis.

Alito also wrote a dissent that would have unjustifiably restricted Congress' authority under the "Commerce Clause" (which is the basis for most federal environmental laws) when he claimed that the law prohibiting the possession of machine guns was unconstitutional. Conservative Oklahoma Republican Senator Tom Coburn denounced Judge Alito's opinion as "wrong," and called it "legislating" from the bench.

Testimony of Dahlia Lithwick, Senior Legal Correspondent,"In addition to the trend toward overruling precedent by stealth, the court has been able to make dramatic changes without even a modicum of drama by chipping away at our access to the courts. Be it through the doctrines of constitutional “standing” or “ripeness,” by virtually doing away with facial constitutional challenges, or by subtly shifting the burden of proof on plaintiffs – it is becoming materially harder for victims of any sort of injustice or discrimination to access the very protections this congress has enacted. ... from environmental protections to worker
protections, to civil rights legislation, Congressional guarantees of equal
justice are only as robust as a citizen’s power to march into a courtroom.
That doorway gets narrower every year."